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Vagueness and Precision

Her Madness’s Ripoff Collective (HMRC) have decided you have to apply for permission to buy leaves. This is not one of my wind-ups of Generation Gullible. It’s madder than that. This is really true.

However, they have not bothered with any of the mechanism of actually applying for permission. You need permission but there is no way to get it. So whether you want tobacco for smoking, snuff, pot-pourri, compost (it’s insecticidal) or to extract vape juice, you need to fill out a form that doesn’t exist to get permission to buy some leaves.

There is always the antismoker scare that nicotine is an insecticide and therefore poison. Just like a big bar of chocolate can kill a Rottweiler. Chocolate is deadly too, if you’re the right species. I don’t know about you but I only have the four limbs and no chitin exoskeleton, nor do I have hair all over nor any inclination to roll in something shitty.

So chocolate won’t kill me and neither will nicotine. If you’re scared of nicotine then logic dictates that you are an insect. For many antismokers that’s probably accurate.

Still, HMRC seem to have forgotten something. I live about 20 miles north of Aberdeen and I can grow tobacco outdoors. Make import impossible and well, I now have a hell of a lot of garden… Could be a good thing for me, and those like me, if importing is banned.

Even better for a nonsmoker with a big garden. They won’t keep back half for themselves 😉

It’s currently legal to grow it in the UK.

Oh they can make it illegal if they want. Cannabis growing is illegal and cannabis is an easily identifiable plant (except to those police who once confiscated tomato plants). Tobacco looks like a big flower. Nobody will notice even if it’s beside the road.

I am also now perfectly placed to push my ‘wild growing tobacco’ idea from a few years back.

Vague laws on tobacco. Yeah, keep it that way. We’ll play the vague game and we’ll win it.

Precision.

In the work-long-in-progress, Panoptica, I have had difficulty keeping ahead of the real dystopia that looms around us. In the story, implanted chips are everything. Your door key, your credit card, your medical record… and more.

The cards you can just wave to buy stuff already exist. The terror of lost or stolen cards will soon get them implanted. If you lose your house keys, what do you do? Wouldn’t it be so much safer if you just wave your hand in front of the door?

Selling this stuff to the public – come on. They will fight to be first.

The reality of Panoptica would be so, so easy to implement. That’s what puts me off finishing it. The dopes in charge already think 1984 and Brave New World are instruction manuals. What they will do with this one doesn’t bear thinking about.

It consists of expressing the juice,which contains most of the nicotine, liming, clarifying, recovering the nicotine from the juice by liquid to liquid extraction with kerosene in a packed column, and finally contacting the kerosene extract with suphuric acid to produce nicotine sulphate of commercial strength (40% nicotine)http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie50506a018?journalCode=iechad

It’s always good to find out what the antis are going on about, even if they don’t know it themselves.

Sorry to clutter up the comments but having just red the regulations if you just grow the plants and do nothing with them except throw them in the compost at the end of the year you still have to register if you have more than 2kg of plant material to throw away! You must be registered to compost completely legal plants.
Section 4.4.

“If you keep plants of the genus Nicotiana for horticultural purposes in the UK then you’ll be exempt from approval to hold or transport the plants when they die (at which point they are raw tobacco and subject to the approval scheme). To be exempt you must not:

hold or transport an amount of waste raw tobacco which exceeds 2kg at any one time
hold approval for another controlled activity
manufacture tobacco products

I had seed from Cyprus that grew well a few years back. I think most types grow okay in the UK, even up here in Scotland. A cold snap in August can be a bugger though – and the ones I tried in the greenhouse suffered with fungus.